South Phoenix Rules (3 page)

3

We had no time to contemplate what had happened. More cops came, crime-lab technicians joined them, our statements were taken, the garage apartment was sealed off. It was four in the morning before we were alone again. I had a brief conversation with Lindsey, who was getting ready for work. She wanted to talk to Robin. When Robin handed the cell back to me, Lindsey said, “She's staying in the guest bedroom. Please don't argue with me about this. I'm tired.” So I didn't. Her voice had sounded so unfamiliar.

The banging on the front door began at five minutes after seven. I had just come back from Starbucks with a latte for Robin and a mocha for myself. The caffeine did little for my headache and the toxic dump I felt in my stomach. Some would call it a hangover. Kate Vare stood on the front step with the rigidness of the indefatigable. She had changed into a black pants suit and had her nine in a holster on her hip.

“Come with me.”

Robin looked at me apprehensively. I shrugged. Outside it was sunny and pleasant, the air dry and cleansed by last night's rain. I saw the blue-and-white Phoenix Police cruiser parked in the driveway.

“Leave those drinks,” Vare commanded.

“Fuck you, Kate.” I was exhausted and cross even before this petite gift of hell had shown up on my doorstep for the second time in less than twelve hours. “Arrest me if you don't like it. Come on, Robin.”

Vare stomped ahead and opened a back door.

“The brass take away your ride?”

“Get in.”

I knew her game. Make us ride in the prisoner compartment. Make us nervous. Oh, and repay me for all the alleged slights over the years when my work on cold cases had somehow crossed the red line of her jurisdiction and her ego.

“Watch your head.” She put her hand on top of Robin's head as she scrunched down and slid onto the seat, just like it happens with real prisoners.

“Watch your head, sir.” It didn't work quite the same with me. I was too tall for her to guide me down, so she didn't try.

“Thank you for your concern, officer.”

She ignored me and slammed the door. It lacked any visible locks, of course. We were essentially prisoners. The backs of patrol cars had changed since I was a young deputy, on my first sojourn into law enforcement before going back to graduate school. In those days, the older cars lacked any protection; suspects just sat in the back seat. The newer ones had rudimentary cage wire to protect the officers sitting in front. Now the prisoner compartment was much more elaborate, and confining, with Plexiglas ahead of us and heavy bars protecting the side windows, to keep suspects from kicking out the glass, wiggling out, and running away. I had seen it happen. Now I just sipped my mocha as Vare drove fast down Fifth Avenue to the Papago Freeway.

“Are you taking us straight to the tent jail?” I spoke through the Plexiglas. She wasn't driving toward downtown.

“God, how I wish.” And that was all she said.

She drove west, took the 35th Avenue exit, and turned toward the South Mountains until she reached Lower Buckeye Road. A collection of ramshackle houses, tilt-up warehouses, and junkyards provided the scenery. The big county complex was off to one side. I avoided looking that way. The inside of the car smelled; it was better for my stomach not to attempt to pick out the origins of the odors. Robin made the mistake of touching the thick vinyl of the seat and withdrew her hand. Her face was tense, her mouth compressed into a thin line barely holding in emotions. Her coffee sat undrunk, her free hand balled up in a fist.

She had thought she was getting a gift from her lover and had waited to open it until after dinner. She hoped he would be joining her as a surprise. She undressed, lit a candle, and poured a glass of wine in anticipation. The X-Acto knife cut easily through the packing tape. Jax's head had been covered with a layer of bubble wrap that had made identification impossible until she had pulled it off—and there he was. Robin had told me this story before the cops arrived and hadn't deviated from it despite hours of Kate Vare's badgering. I didn't trust Robin for my own reasons, but she had nothing to do with this crime.

At 51st Avenue, a large field was still left on the southwest corner. I couldn't identify the crop—maybe alfalfa?—but the view was a time machine into old Phoenix, the place where I had grown up. If you blocked out an ugly brown subdivision a couple of miles south, the vista was magnificent. Green field running toward the rough, treeless mountains in the distance under a vault of pure Western sky. It gave me a moment's solace. I just watched the land and felt my chest fill with breath. Then Vare jerked the car to the right and we were inside a housing development.

One way in and out, surrounded by an outside wall, curvy streets, look-alike stucco houses with large driveways, big garages, and small front doors. No shade. It was unremarkable for what passed for a “neighborhood” in most of Phoenix, except that it looked mostly unoccupied, with a trail of For Sale signs along the street Vare drove. I saw two PPD units sitting in the asphalt gulf where the street curved north. It held three houses closely sandwiched into the bend. The door to one tan house was standing open, guarded by a uniform.

Vare turned in the seat. “Does your friend recognize this house, Mapstone?”

“She's got a name and she can speak for herself. Unless you're arresting us and then we're not saying a damned thing…”

Robin interrupted. “I've never been here in my life.” She took a long draw on the latte and ran her other hand through her tousled hair, pulling it back over her shoulder, trying to tuck part of the strands under her ears. She watched me watch her as the car door opened.

Vare led us beneath the festive yellow tape and into the house. At the entryway, we all put on light blue crime-scene booties. I didn't like the smell. But we followed her through the narrow entry hall and back into the sunny, high-ceilinged Arizona room. There was no furniture, no drapes. She pointed into the kitchen, where a body was slung over the top of the center island. It was the body of a man, completely naked. Blood had dripped down the counter tiles onto the new floor. It was mostly dry. Robin gave a small animal's alarm call, covered her mouth, and ran back outside.

“Crime scene's on the way. Don't touch anything.” Vare laid her hand on the butt of her Glock.

“Don't accidentally shoot yourself, Kate,” I said. I breathed through my mouth, which would help for a while, before I started to taste the rotting odor. Thank God it wasn't in summer. The body hadn't been here long—long enough for rigor to go away, twelve hours give-or-take as I recalled—but not long enough to putrefy and swell. I kept my distance, walking slowly in an orbit of six feet away. It wasn't that I hadn't seen bodies. I just didn't want the tightly wound living body in the black pants suit to freak out and make me leave.

The dead body belonged to a male about my height with an athletic build. His thighs, calves, and hands were bloody from wounds. One hand was larger than the other. A large pool of blood congealed between his legs, which were slightly open. I stepped around a cordless drill. It had a small, bloody bit in its mouth. Close to the refrigerator, a stained handsaw lay on the fashionable Spanish tiles of the upgraded kitchen. The body was missing its head.

Even in Phoenix, there probably weren't that many headless bodies at the moment.

“Jax.” I whispered it.

Vare shook her head. “Is that his name? Your girlfriend's…”

“She's…not!” Something in my voice actually made her take a step back.

“Well, she's looking at some major trouble, Mapstone. She's lying. I can tell it. You can, too—don't deny it. I can't tell if you're lying because I never believe you anyway. You both had better start cooperating.”

I asked her how she had found the body. It didn't look as if any of the neighboring houses were occupied, so this was no place for a block watch. A tip, she said.

“A tip? From where? What kind of tip?” I turned away from the corpse and faced her straight on, trying not to let my anger take over. It wasn't easy.

“I can't tell you that, sir,” she said, wagging a finger at me, emphasizing that last word, leaving no doubt that I was now just a
civilian
. She had a large gold wedding band on her hand with diamonds in it. Somebody once told me she had three children. I couldn't imagine. She went on, “Let's go through it again. Jax Delgado…”

So I went through it again: I'd known him for six weeks, since about the time he and Robin had started dating. She met him at a First Friday gallery exhibit. Lindsey and I liked him and invited them both for drinks and dinner. His grandfather was from Cuba and he'd grown up in Miami. I'd seen him maybe a dozen times, mostly fleeting.

“You'd better notify New York University,” I said. “He's on the faculty. They'll have next-of-kin information.”

Vare laughed, showing her prominent incisors. “Mapstone, if you're telling the truth, you're a fucking idiot.”

“It wouldn't be the first time both those things were true.”

The new voice was deep, commanding, familiar. I turned my head to see Mike Peralta filling my vision. Behind him was Robin.

Vare rounded on him. “This is not your jurisdiction. You're almost ou…” She stopped herself.

Peralta smiled slightly. “Everything is my jurisdiction, Kate. For a few more days, at least.”

4

The uniformed cops in the entry hall had already made room for the big man in the tan suit. His thick hair was combed straight back from a wide forehead and the years had turned it from black to charcoal. His face: carve it into a mountainside. You had to know how to watch his eyes and mouth to see what was really going on inside him. Now he walked into the room with his deliberate tread. His dark eyes ignored mine, taking in the scene even as his head barely moved. Robin stood beside him, her hand on his arm. Two of her could have fit inside him.

“Is this him?” Peralta spoke with uncommon gentleness. Robin nodded.

“What's that, Miss Bryson? I need a positive identification.” Kate Vare took Robin by the arm and led her close to the body, waving an outstretched arm as if she were showing off a new car. “Was this the man you had been seeing?”

Robin wrapped her arms tightly across her sweatshirt, pushing up her breasts. Vare kept hold of her. “Yes.” Her eyes were wide and wet. “It's Jax.”

“How do you know?”

“We were lovers.” Robin's skin grew pale.

“Accomplices, maybe?” Vare held her close to the corpse.

Robin shook her head adamantly. “You don't know anything.”

Vare released her grip. “Now I want these civilians outside.”

Peralta held up a hand. “Robin can sit in my car. Mapstone is still a deputy sheriff.”

Vare's face dropped in dismay.

“I haven't put through his papers yet.” He reached in his suit-coat pocket, produced my sheriff's office identification card, then pinned it onto my shirt like a shabby medal. Peralta said, “I think we'll both see what you've got.”

“Well, Mapstone's history won't do any good here,” Vare sulked. Peralta might have been the outgoing sheriff, but he was still close friends with the police chief, so she was stuck with us.

“La Fam?”

“Looks that way,” Vare answered.

Peralta grunted. I stood back, trying to keep up.

He produced a set of latex gloves and snapped them on, then stood over the kitchen island like a surgeon examining the work of a demented colleague.

“So did you track the package?” He already knew what had happened. It had only been twenty-four hours since I had last seen him, but somehow it seemed longer. I couldn't tell whether I was glad to see him here or not. Considering Kate Vare was the lead investigator, I decided I was delighted.

Vare spoke reluctantly, pausing to give me the cop eye. “It was sent from the FedEx Office store on Central, uptown, you know, the old Kinko's. Fake name and address of the sender. We're going to interview the employee who saw the sender later this morning.”

Peralta nodded and went back to the corpse.

I heard one young uniform whisper to another: “Jax in the Box. May I take your order?” Another: “It gives a whole new meaning to giving head.”

Peralta's voice overrode them. “They tortured him with the drill…” He pointed to the dark craters on his legs and the top of one hand, then he stepped lightly in a counter-clockwise circle, his eyes scanning, his head momentarily shielded by his back and broad shoulders. “Slit open his scrotum. That was probably late in the game.”

He turned back to the rest of us and pointed. “See his left hand? That's from being dipped in boiling water repeatedly. Make sure crime scene gets that shot.”

Vare just had to stand there and take it. Her tight frame was almost humming with tension. I wondered if the black pants suit would burst into flames. I loved it. She said, “Yes, Sheriff.”

Emerson said there is no history, only biography. If that's true, Mike Peralta encapsulated much of what was worth knowing about the best of law enforcement in Phoenix, not to mention more of my life than I cared to dwell on at that moment. I'd first met him when he was a trainer at the academy, then he had broken me in as my first partner.

We remained friends for the years I lived away from Phoenix, teaching in Ohio and San Diego. He never stopped saying that it was a mistake for me to be anything but a cop, and when I came home after my first marriage broke up he gave me a job. A pile of old cases—clean them up, he said. So I did, using the historian's techniques married to my cop knowledge. It became a full-time job, working the crimes that ran from the 1960s all the way back to statehood. I didn't fool myself: It had been good publicity for the sheriff to have an egghead on staff. I also solved some major cases. The old ID card hung familiarly from my pocket.

“La Fam,” I said. “I didn't think they had a big presence here.”

I heard the naiveté in my voice even before I finished the sentence. La Familia was one of the most notorious gangs in Mexico and Southern California. Its signature execution was beheading. I cleared my throat. “But it wouldn't be surprising to see them expanding with all the destabilization caused by the recession.”

Peralta's eyes fixed on me. They said, shut up. I looked down at the blood spatter on the floor. Gangs were nothing new to Phoenix. Contrary to the local feel-good spin, Phoenix had been a Mafia hangout for decades. Some old cops told me that it had more mobsters per capita than New York City in the 1950s. It was close to the mob's operations in Vegas, close to the border, easy to be anonymous. They hung out at places like the Blue Grotto, the Clown's Den, Durant's, Rocky's Hideaway, and the Ivanhoe. Old Phoenix had been a paradise with snakes, indeed. It's what kept my nostalgia for what had been lost from slipping into the lie of sentimentality. But I admitted to myself that I was way behind on the gangs of today, aside from knowing they were large, sophisticated, and deadly. That knowledge rarely penetrated my office in the old courthouse, where the crimes were as old as the architecture around me and where Peralta deliberately kept me segregated from the rest of the Sheriff's Office.

“Did you know this subject, Sheriff?” Vare asked, tilting her sharp chin toward the corpse.

“I met him once. Seemed nice enough.” Peralta slid off the gloves and handed them to one of the young cops. There'd been a time, when the Arizona Dreams case was busted open, when I thought Peralta and Robin might actually become an item. It had never happened and I didn't know why. That was fine with both Lindsey and me. It would have led to too many complications. And we still missed Peralta's ex-wife Sharon. Mike as chief deputy and then sheriff, Sharon as a psychologist and best-selling author: They were a power couple without airs. It seemed impossible to imagine him with anyone else. Knowing him, I suspected he didn't want anyone trying to get close now. The cops, that was what he was all about, and now even that was gone. Of course, he didn't lack for job offers, all of them paying more than the post of Maricopa County Sheriff. I wondered for a few seconds where he might end up. It helped shave the edge off my emotions.

Peralta stepped back and thrust his hands into his pockets, pushing back his wide-cut suit coat enough so that I could see the .45 in his shoulder rig. He faced Vare. “So why would Professor Delgado here have ended up with La Fam? Unless he wasn't who he claimed to be…”

“That's the whole deal!” Vare's voice trembled in agitation. I felt my chest grow tight. “He's a fraud. There's no Jax Delgado on the NYU faculty, contrary to what Mapstone and the girl keep telling me.” She glared at me. “Oh, you're surprised?”

“How…?” It was all I could manage.

“He's not on the faculty. Nobody by that name. Nobody matching his description. We emailed a photo. No, Mapstone, we didn't wait. We woke people up. This is a major case. Somebody beheaded by La Familia in Phoenix, or a La Fam copycat—whatever—and the head shipped to a woman who lives in a historic district? If the media get hold of this it won't be just another forgotten asshole-on-asshole homicide in Scaryvale.”

“What about this cat's ID?”

“No wallet, nothing on the body. No clothes left.” She leaned toward him. “Sheriff, I hate to tell you, but the girl is lying and I wonder about Mapstone here.”

“We all do, Kate. But I'm going to give them a ride home now. You got your positive ID. You know where to find Mapstone and Robin.”

“What's that under the drill?” I said.

I had been desperately searching for gravity as they were talking and my eyes had wandered. Something the color of dull silver was sitting beneath handle of the power drill.

Vare just stood there, as if anything I said was illegitimate, but Peralta took out a cheap plastic pen and slightly lifted the tool from the floor. I was expecting to see a bolt and learn some new, unwanted information about torture, but no. Underneath was a ring. Vare knelt—her knees cracked—and lifted it in her gloved hand. Peralta gently let the drill down exactly where it had sat.

“Shit.” She said it quietly. Then she held it up for the sheriff to see.

He bent towards her, squinting. “It might be a copycat,” he said. “A wanna-be.”

“Maybe,” she said, unconvinced. “It looks like platinum. Not cheap.”

I moved over to them, bent down on my haunches. It was a man's signet ring with a sharp engraving protruding from it.

It was an image of a rattlesnake's head.

I said, “Kate, it's you.”

“Asshole,” she said quietly.

“El Verdugo.” Peralta spoke with gravity and fluency. My Spanish was rusty but I knew the word. “The executioner.” Nobody said anything for at least a minute.

I held out my hands, waiting.

Vare sounded like my fourth-grade teacher lecturing the bad kids in the front row. “Pedro Alejandro Vega. Big-time hit man for the Sinaloa cartel. When he kills, he leaves the ring's implant on the victim's forehead. Like an artist signing a painting.”

“I've never seen Jax wear that ring.”

“That doesn't mean shit,” Vare said. “There's no photo of Vega. He's never been arrested. He's almost like a folklore legend in the narcocorridos.” She rolled her r's, something I could never master, using the word for the songs that romanticized the exploits of the drug world. “Your Jax could easily be Pedro Vega. And then, I've got a whole list of new questions for you and this Robin Bryson.”

“Whatever.” Anger burned my throat. I processed, trying to see the world as it was, not as I wanted it to be. The foulness of the air was now in my taste buds.

“If La Fam killed El Verdugo…” Vare was talking to herself, tucking her head down, saying words that would confuse any Iowans who just moved to town but were obviously of great interest to the PPD. She dropped the ring into a plastic evidence envelope, muttered profanities. “What the hell was he doing in Phoenix, posing as a college professor?”

“That's not my problem, Kate,” I said. “Sounds like a gang-unit deal, and you can go back to trying to close screwed-up cases from the eighties.”